CHAPTER VI
On theday that Sylvia and her guests were coming from the north, and David probably from the south, there was no sunshine. There was a cold, unsteady, wind, and a cold, hard, low-hung mackerel sky, under which the sea moved rough and restless, topped with racing caps of white. All the world was gray and forlorn; distances were shortened, the little houses in Crowchester and Keyport were closed against the weather and showed no sign of life except the varying plumes of smoke that rose from their frosted roofs. From them occasionally emerged muffled and mittened figures, with tippets blowing behind them or bellying giddily before; Gabrielle, who had gone into town with John on some last errands, thought she had never seen so many shabby hungry gulls, so many lean cats investigating snow-topped garbage barrels, such dreary-looking raiment hung snow-laden upon such sagging clotheslines.
“A heavy storm on the way,” John said. And Gabrielle, beside him on the front seat of the little car, with a crate of eggs steadied at her feet and two quarts of whipping cream held firmly in two bottles in her lap, looked up at the scudding sky and thought with exhilaration that it was probably true, and that all the company, and David, would be here in a few hours, to make merry in Wastewater and defy it.
She picked and seeded raisins for an hour in the kitchen before luncheon, and came to the meal with her cheeks red and her head hot, and after luncheon went out into the woods, where a genuine colour presently stung the warm brunette skin to glowing, and where wrestling and tugging with obdurate saplings made her tingle from head to foot and push her hat back from her damp forehead, laughing and panting with the tussle. Aunt Flora had said, with one of her rare touches of companionship, “I would just like that empty corner of the hall filled up—some sort of branchy thing——” and Gabrielle had been only too glad to make it her business to fill it. She had left her aunt “resting,” as unusual an employment for Flora as were the flush on her face and the wire curlers in her hair.
Everyone in the big house had been wrought, now, to a pitch of expectation bordering upon fever. The last plate was washed, the last spoon polished; the shelves of long-unused pantries downstairs were loaded with cakes and pies and cold meats and bread and sauces and trembling jellies; the big rooms upstairs were aired and warmed; there were fat comforters folded invitingly across the foot of the big, freshly made beds; there were open fires and stove fires everywhere. Floors shone with wax; palms moved green fronds gently in well-dusted corners; lamps were filled, clocks were ticking busily. Gabrielle felt in her veins the excitement that is a part of physical strain. She, like everyone else, was tired, but it was a happy sort of fatigue, after all.
On this last afternoon she had gone a little deeper into the woods than was necessary, or than she had plannedto go for the last greens, as a glance at her wrist watch showed her. It was already half-past three o’clock when, with her arms full of fragrant boughs, she started back toward the house, perhaps a mile away. The day had grown a little colder, the wind had steadied to something like a gale, and the sea—for she never was quite out of sight of the sea—was in an uproar, running high and wild, breaking furiously upon the rocks, and flinging itself twenty feet into the air when these stood fast, as they had stood for a thousand years.
Suddenly, creeping through bare boughs like little silent fairies shod in down, came drifting the first snowflakes. They came timidly, irresolutely at first, clinging here to a fir and there to a bare maple twig, moving restlessly and gently in all directions, fluttering, changing places, like the breast-feathers of a white baby swan, from which perhaps, thought Gay whimsically, Mother Nature, who loves to repeat her forms, had copied them.
“Oh, this is glorious!” she said aloud to the sweet, empty forest. And she began to walk briskly with that dancing step of hers that meant utter happiness and felicity.
When she came within sight of Wastewater’s walls the storm was upon them; the snow was falling rapidly and steadily now, and with a denseness that made a sort of twilight in the world. It fell dry, close, only slightly at an angle; Wastewater’s outbuildings were already furred deep, and John’s wife Etta was laughing as she backed the little car into the shed for shelter.
“This is a terror, Miss Gabrielle!” she shouted. “It’ll be a white Christmas, all right! I only hope thatMiss Fleming and her company don’t get held up somewheres! I declare, you can’t see twenty feet in it!”
Gabrielle shouted back, fled upon her way about the big north wing, through a sort of tunnel of dry branches above an arbour already heavily powdered with white.
Her thoughts were all on the house, all intent upon reaching the side door, all upon the necessary stamping, shaking, disburdening herself of outer garments and her branches of snow; it was after four now, she must be ready in the velvet dress when Sylvia came at six——
Suddenly she stopped short in the lonely side garden, where the snow was falling so fast, recoiled, and heard her own choking exclamation of dismay. Something was moving in the snow, something bent and whitened with flakes—but human! Gabrielle’s heart almost suffocated her, and she felt her throat constrict with pure terror.
It was a child—it was a little old woman, doubled up with years, with wisps of white hair showing about a pallid old face that was scarcely a wholesomer colour than they, or than the falling snowflakes. She had her back half turned to Gabrielle, and was creeping along against a sort of hedge of tightly set firs, her old black cape or shawl topped with white, her thick shoes furred with it. She was muttering to herself as she went, and Gabrielle could hear her, now that the wind had died out and the silent, twisting curtains of snow muffled all other sounds.
Pity and concern for the forlorn old creature almost immediately routed the girl’s first wild, vague fears, and she dropped her branches and followed the wavering footsteps, laying a timid hand upon the woman’sshoulder. Instantly a yellowish ivory face and two wild eyes were turned upon her, and the stranger shrieked with a sound that was all the more horrible because so helpless and so weak. It was almost like the cry of a wind-blown gull, and here in the unearthly solitude and quiet of the storm it frightened Gabrielle with a sense of forlornness and horror. The house, only a few feet away, with fires and voices, seemed unattainable.
“Come in—come in!” cried Gabrielle, guiding her with a strong young arm. “You’ll die out here—it’s a terrible night! And you know it will be dark in ten minutes,” she added, half pushing and half dragging the old form, which was astonishingly light and made but a feeble resistance. “Daisy—Margret!” called Gabrielle, at last flinging open the side door upon the blessed security and warmth of the hall. “Call Mrs. Fleming, will you! This poor old woman’s gotten lost in the garden——”
“My God—what is this!” It was Flora’s voice, but not one that Gabrielle had ever heard before. The hallway was instantly filled with concerned and frightened women, unduly frightened, Gabrielle thought, for the last of her own terrors had disappeared under the first ray of lamplight. “It’s nothing, Gabrielle,” said Flora, choking, and with her face strangely livid, as she stood slightly above the level of the others, on the stairs, clutching her dressing gown together. “It’s some poor woman from Crowchester, Margret!” she stammered. “Come upstairs and dress, Gabrielle. Take her—take her to the kitchen, Hedda, and give her some tea, and I’ll be right down!”
“Imagine!” Gabrielle said, eagerly. “She might have died in the storm, the poor old thing!”
The old woman had been turning herself uneasily, looking with rapidly blinking eyes from one to the other. Now the servants were gently urging her toward the doorway that led to the warm kitchen regions, and to Gabrielle’s amazement she seemed to be displaying a weak disinclination to go.
“Who’s this girl, Flora?” she said now, in a cracked, querulous voice. “You stop pushing me, Margret!” she added, fretfully.
It was Gabrielle’s turn to show amazement and consternation. She looked from one stricken, conscious face to another, and her own bright, frost-glowing cheeks faded a little. This trembling bit of human wreckage, dragged in from the storm, was not quite a stranger, at all events.
Flora’s face was ghastly; Hedda looked more than ordinarily idiotic. But Margret, eighty years old, spoke hearteningly.
“It’s old Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Fleming, from Keyport. She’s——” Margret had one stout old arm about the cowering stranger, and now she gave the other women a significant glance and tapped her own forehead with her free hand. “We’ll give her some tea and dry her out a bit, and then maybe John’ll take her home,” said Margret, “when he takes the sleigh in for Miss Fleming!”
Gabrielle, perfectly satisfied with the explanation and the arrangement, went upstairs beside her aunt.
“Oh, will John have the big sleigh out?” she asked, enthusiastically. Flora did not answer; she looked ill.She parted from Gabrielle without a word and went downstairs. But half an hour later, when the girl had had a hot bath and was busy with the bright masses of her hair before her mirror, she started suddenly to find that her aunt had come quietly into the room.
By this time Gabrielle had had time to think over her little adventure, and even in all the day’s excitement and expectation she had felt an uncomfortable reaction from it. She shuddered whenever she remembered herself hurrying so innocently along the snowy lanes in the twilight, and the hideous fright of that first sight of something moving—something human, shadowy gray and white against the gray and white shadows of the hedge.
“That was a horrid experience with that poor old woman, Aunt Flora,” she said now, distressed at her own emotion.
“You must think no more about it,” Flora, giving no reason for her visit to Gabrielle’s room, said firmly. “The girls have taken good care of her, and John is to drive her back when he goes. She’s perfectly harmless—poor soul. I would rather you didn’t mention it to Sylvia, Gabrielle, by the way.”
Gabrielle, after a bewildered upward glance, of course agreed never to mention the circumstance to Sylvia—indeed, never to think of the poor old soul again. She went cheerfully on toward the pleasant moment of assuming the velvet gown, when Aunt Flora was gone, brushing her rich hair simply back, pleased in spite of herself with her unusual colour, and satisfied with the brown silk stockings and the brown pumps.
Suddenly there was a sound of laughter and voicesand sleigh bells under her window, and for a moment she thought, with a sense of panic, that the company had come. She ran to her window and peeped down.
Below was darkness, through which the snow was falling—falling. But a great shaft of light shone out from the side door, and in it she could see the old red sleigh, filled with furry robes, and John on the front seat, already looking like a snow man. Daisy and Sarah and Maria and Etta were teasing John; it was evident that he and the two big horses were about to start off into the storm, and the maids were amused.
But there was no little old woman being bundled into the sleigh. No, though Maria shook out all the rugs and Etta put a great waterproof cover over them, Gabrielle saw nothing of her.
Where was she, then? Had Margret decided to keep her at Wastewater overnight? Odd!——
Odd, mused Gabrielle, slowly finishing her dressing. Odder still to have Margret herself, coming upstairs to take a last look at the waiting rooms, affirm that the poor old lady had gotten off in a great bustle with John, and surely her family was already wild with fright over her disappearance on such a night.
But again things of more vital interest to herself put these little mysteries out of Gabrielle’s head. For when she had gone downstairs, come up again, gone the rounds of the rooms, touching a new cake of soap here, and putting a small log into a stove there; when she had feared that this hall was too warm, and that passage too cold, and when she had stolen at least a hundred glances at her pretty flushed face in various mirrors and admired a hundred times the simple perfection of the velvetgown, Gabrielle really did hear sleigh bells again in the night, voices, laughter again. Then there was a sort of flurry downstairs, and the big front doors opened to a wild rush of wind and night and snow and storm that made the curtains balloon wildly even upstairs, and the lamps plunge convulsedly. Gabrielle heard “Mamma!” in what was of course Sylvia’s voice; then eager greetings and introductions and a perfect babel of voices.
She had been upstairs in the front hall; now, by simply descending, she could follow the company into the downstairs sitting room, which had been made warm and ready for this moment of arrival. Gabrielle in the darkness above stretched a hand for the smooth guidance of the wide balustrade and went down in light flight, like a skimming bird.
She had almost reached the lower level, which was but dimly lighted, when she saw that two persons were lingering in the hall, and stopped short, instinctively fearful that she had disturbed them. One was a woman, dark, furred, slender, and wearing a small, snow-powdered hat. The other was David.
Gabrielle was eighteen in years, but older in many ways than her years. She looked down and saw David, smiling that attentive smile of his, tall, broad, yet leanly built, belted into a brown coat that was not new, saying nothing that she could hear—just looking at this girl—just himself—David——
And that instant changed the whole world. Gabrielle did not analyze the strange sweet weakness that flowed over her like a river, from head to foot. She did not say even to herself, “He is handsome. He is good.He is kind.” No need for that—too late for that. Her heart went to him simply, completely. She had been one woman a moment ago, she was another now. Much of what she had heard and read of love had been a sealed book to her; it was all clear now. Reason, logic, convention had always influenced her; these were all so many words now.
She heard Sylvia, turning her head to look over her shoulder and so bring a beautiful face close to his, say affectionately: “So many thousands of things to tell you, David!” and although she did not hear the brief words, or perhaps the single word of his reply, she heard the tone, and she heard Sylvia’s low laugh.
Gabrielle sat down on the stairs in the semi-darkness. Her heart was hammering, and her mouth dry. The world—youth—beauty, jealousy—love—marriage—all these things moved before her consciousness like maskers coming into the light. She stood up, on the halfway landing, and the woman in velvet with the tawny hair stood up, too. Gay walked slowly to the mirror, studied her own face. She was breathing hard, she was confused, half frightened.
She heard Maria calling her. Her aunt was asking for her.
“Say I’m coming!” Gabrielle said, clearing her throat.
David was down there, she would meet him—have to talk to him—before all their eyes——
She went slowly downstairs.